The ‘Kentler Project’ in West Berlin routinely placed homeless children with pedophile men, assuming they’d make ideal foster parents. A study has found the practice went on for decades.
Berlin’s Green Party called on Tuesday for an investigation into a massive child abuse scandal that saw foster children placed into the care of pedophiles for more than 30 years – all the way up to 2003. According to a new report published on Monday, the city’s educational authorities and Senate knew what was taking place, and the practice was “accepted, supported, [and] defended” by left-wing politicians and academics throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
“There were and are networks,” Green politician Marianne Burkert-Eulitz told the Berliner Zeitung on Tuesday, calling on the left-wing SPD and FDP parties to own up to their responsibility for the scandal.
Burkert-Eulitz and her party colleagues likely know a thing or two about opening up. The party’s predecessor, the Alternative List, was a clearinghouse for lunatic liberationist ideologies in the 1970s and 80s. At the party’s convention in 1985, a splinter group calling itself ‘Gays and Pederasts’ demanded the legalization of adult/child sex. The Greens have spent nearly a decade repudiating this sordid slice of their history, but according to Monday’s report, their activity was just the tip of the iceberg.
According to DW Helmut Kentler (1928-2008) was in a leading position at Berlin’s center for educational research. He was convinced that sexual contact between adults and children was harmless.
Several years ago two of the victims came forward and told their story, since then the researchers at Hildesheim University have plowed through files and conducted interviews.
What they found was a “network across educational institutions,” the state youth welfare office and the Berlin Senate, in which pedophilia was “accepted, supported, defended.”
Kentler himself was in regular contact with the children and their foster fathers. He was never prosecuted: By the time his victims came forward, the statute of limitations for his actions had expired. This has also thus far prevented the victims from getting any compensation.
The researchers found that several of the foster fathers were high-profile academics. They speak of a network that included high-ranking members of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin’s Free University, and the notorious Odenwald School in Hesse, West Germany, which was at the center of a major pedophilia scandal several years ago. It has since been closed down.
The ‘Sexual Revolution’ of the 1960s saw academics across the western world challenge the staid social norms of the time. However, the era of free love and women’s liberation also birthed some truly degenerate ideas, such as Kentler’s. The politicians who supported Kentler and his institution could have pressed the brakes at any time. Instead, as the Hildesheim University report describes in horrific detail, they aided, abetted and defended his worst excesses.
Kentler as well as the politicians who supported them – are now dead. Files detailing the full extent of the abuse – said by Burkert-Eulitz to number in the thousands – are still under lock and key in the Berlin education administration’s archive. The Green lawmaker demanded on Tuesday that they be released, and that the abuse scandal be made public in all its depravity.
“Our lives have been ruined,” a 40-year-old survivor of Fritz’ abuse told DW this week. “You can never really get over it,” another added.
Kentler, on the other hand, was unrepentant. In a report to the senate’s family and youth department in 1988, he described the twisted trial as “a complete success.”
